YAYOI KUSAMA

Posted on 2017-11-13

Kusama’s work has transcended some of the most important art movements of the second half of the twentieth century, including Pop art and Minimalism. Born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan, she briefly studied painting in Kyoto before moving to New York City in the late 1950s. She began her large-scale infinity net paintings during this decade, and went on to apply their obsessive, hallucinatory qualities to three-dimensional work. In a unique style that is both sensory and utopian, Kusama’s work—which spans paintings, performances, room-size presentations, sculptural installations, literary works, films, fashion, design, and interventions within existing architectural structures—possesses a highly personal character, yet one that has connected profoundly with large audiences around the globe. Throughout her career she has been able to break down traditional barriers between work, artist, and spectator.

Exhibition runs through to December 16th, 2017

David Zwirner
525 West 19th Street
NY 10011 New York
USA

www.davidzwirner.com

  

MADSAKI – BADA BING, BADA BOOM

Posted on 2017-11-13

New works will be featured in the exhibition, including works based on scenes from classic American films popular among Koreans such as Roman Holiday, Léon: The Professional, Rebel Without a Cause, Gone With the Wind, Indiana Jones and Sound of Music. In addition, the Self-portrait and Flower Series by Andy Warhol, as well as new works from MADSAKI’s Character Series, an assemble of American and Japanese characters, will also be on view. MADSAKI, a master of spray paint, uses the paint splashing nozzle like a brush, a technique which ultimately yields wild, yet delicate works.

Spray paint is a powerful tool that injects and peppers paint, allowing Graffiti artists to quickly cover huge walls or storefront shutters and billboards, or sides of subway trains with large letters a few meters wide. The paint that scatters through the air under pressure does not require any physical contact with its user, irregardless of whether the surface flat or uneven. Ordinarily, it would be considered a violent act to use spray paint on a canvas which is more often appropriate for delicate paintings displayed indoors. Yet the enticing attraction of the motifs in MADSAKI’s works seem familiar and are strongly tied to the details that reside within those spattered paint particles.

Opposite – Riders On The Storm, 2017.

Exhibition runs through to January 13th, 2018

Perrotin
1F 5 Palpan-Gil, Jongno-Gu
Seoul
South Korea

www.perrotin.com

  

DONALD BAECHLER

Posted on 2017-11-06

With this show, Baechler continues his explorations of heavily outlined, iconic imagery set against richly textured, layered fields. In many of the new paintings, the field is composed of fabric collage, overlaid with striations and blots of pastel-colored acrylic paint. The forms are thick and solidly rendered; floating untethered within its borders. There is an awkwardness and alienation that infuses his figures, which include sickly looking, moon-headed men; a handcuffed prisoner guided by a police officer’s hand; and a pair of armless, Brancusi-inspired lovers locked in a kiss.

Critically, Baechler has been linked to the Neo-Expressionist generation of painters, but he has also been deeply influenced by the Conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth, and he has listed Cy Twombly, Giotto, and Robert Rauschenberg as the three artists most important to his thinking. Expressive brushwork combined with abstract, formal rigor has defined Baechler’s work from early on, and these paintings, which are deeply embedded in the history of modernist and postwar art, foreground their visual links to artists as different as James Ensor and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Opposite – SEVERED SHADOW, 2017

Exhibition runs through to December 23rd, 2017

Cheim & Read
547 West 25th Street
10001 New York

www.cheimread.com

  

CLIVE HEAD: ZOETIC-REALISM

Posted on 2017-11-06

Clive Head is widely considered one of the leading realist painters of his generation. In the upcoming exhibition, Clive Head: Zoetic-Realism, Hollis Taggart Galleries will present a selection of works, on canvas and paper, to launch the artist’s association with the gallery. This is the first solo exhibition to bring a substantial body of Head’s recent work together – twenty-four paintings, drawings and etchings will be displayed in the exhibition.

Born in England, in Maidstone, Kent, Head has garnered much acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic over the many decades of his career. This exhibition, aptly titled, bears witness to the way Head capture life around him. His highly complex compositions of human activities are zoetic and energized. And, unlike past Photorealists, Head does not reveal a single moment frozen in time. Instead, with deft ability, he captures multiple perspectives with multiple concurrent timelines, moving through time and space. These fragmented urban depictions, most often with figures are in essence time-lapsed compilations. The compositions are highly engaging and immediately fascinate the observer. Time seems to come to a kaleidoscopic halt on his canvases and his subjects are masterfully rendered.

Opposite – Siddal’s Ferry, 2015

Exhibition runs from November 16th – December 22nd, 2017

Hollis Taggart Galleries
521 W 26th Street
7th Floor
NY 10001
New York

www.hollistaggart.com

  

BRIDGET RILEY – MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Posted on 2017-11-06

The exhibition focuses upon Bridget Riley’s most recent works, the Disc series. Two wall paintings and eight canvases with muted colours will be on view.

Internationally acclaimed artist Bridget Riley has radically pursued an inquiry into the constituent elements of painting for over 50 years, exploring the active role of perception in art. The British artist started her experimentations at the very beginning of the 1960s with a series of black and white paintings in which she ingenuously arranged elementary abstract shapes – such as circles, curves, stripes – so as to create a feeling of depth and movement that would cause disorientation to the viewer’s eye.

In 1965, Riley was invited to show her work along with Joseph Albers, Max Bill, Enrico Castellani, Robert Irwin, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Ad Reinhardt and other artists in The Responsive Eye, a major exhibition that was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The event led to instant international recognition of her optical focus. The artist never claimed to be part of any group. During Op Art’s greatest success in the mid-1960s, Riley stressed the originality of her process that had no direct link with science. Not long afterwards, she started to explore the properties of colours. Influenced by Cézanne and Seurat, her works can be seen as the outcome of these masters’ concerns. Her paintings seem to flicker, to pulsate and to convey an internal life.

Opposite – Wall painting A (title to follow), 2017

Exhibition runs through to November 25th, 2017

Galerie Max Hetzler
57, rue du Temple
75004 Paris

maxhetzler.com

  

SAM WINDETT – MOTORWAY IV

Posted on 2017-10-30

Themes of time, movement and repetition, partly taken from the artist’s memories of driving through the South West of England, resonate throughout the work.

Multiple layers of paint, charcoal and textured marks combining torn and cut paper intertwine, evoking broken landscapes caught in a hinterland between abstraction, narrative and representation. Physical and ephemeral aspects of road travel are at play in the work, from the scrambled black and white surfaces of the wet road to the static of a car radio and the surrounding darkness of a night drive. References to radio compound not only through painterly representations of white noise, but in dial-like forms and the repeated letters FM and AM. The recurring motif of the disc doubles up both as suns and moons or the headlights of approaching cars. In the smaller canvases, cell structures resemble the veins of vascular leaves, plants or invented ribcages. Seemingly organic forms contradict their evolution from the motif of fragmented mechanical bodies in earlier paintings of aeroplanes or drones.

Opposite – Motorway IV — FM/AM, 2017

Exhibition runs through to November 5th, 2017

The Approach
1st Floor, 47 Approach Road
Bethnal Green
E2 9LY
London

theapproach.co.uk